Parenting
Oh, no, I wasn’t offering any. I was asking for help with my greasy hair. Often times I don’t have time to wash my hair. I have loads and yards of it and when I’m taking a bath at midnight {ME TIME!} or with the kids {THEM TIME!} I don’t want to stick my head awkwardly under the faucet and wash. So it can go a week+ and look pretty grease ball. Or maybe it’s okay? Humor me. No. Don’t. It’s greasy. Looking. My girlfriend Natalia over at Ma Nouvelle Mode has a youtube channel with hair help. She’s very very helpful!! And Katie at Wellness Mama has homemade natural shampoo, too. If you have darker hair, I think you can pull of the no shampoo forever and it doesn’t look greasy look. My sister Molly has! She alleges her husband didn’t even notice she hadn’t shampooed. Aron, is this true? But back to me and my make believe blonde–I mean reminding my hair follicles of the color God wanted them. What do I do with greasy hair when I have to go to a party (above pictured), or church (imagine this ^^ dress with a shrug), or a date ^^. ?? Do you like the kids’ bath toys in the background? Me too. Help a girlfriend out. That’s me.
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Most of my friends having babies have support. They have a husband or partner. They have access to childbirth education to learn about what’s happening inside, and how that inside baby comes out. They are supported to be able to breastfeed if they choose it. Yeah, we have birth privilege. ^^ me & my doula, Liz Abbene! What about women who aren’t well enough off to afford birth classes? What about women who are unexpectedly pregnant, who choose life for their babies, or who are recent immigrants and English isn’t yet familiar to them? What about those mamas and those babies? Who’s going to be their educator? Their doula? Their nursing support system? Because let’s be honest. The world looks at low-income pregnant moms and thinks another baby?? The world thinks they’re not worth helping and that those babies shouldn’t be here. The world sees them as a problem, a burden on society. Worthless. To be disregarded, disrespected, and looked down on. My friends Mary and Debby started Everyday Miracles. These women are the real thing. I interviewed them last year. Read it here. This is the kind of work that would make Blessed Mother Teresa proud. They pour out their love, energy, and kindness on moms like the ones I’ve described. They are love in action. This is what Christ meant when he said to take care of the least of our brethren. I’m so blown away by the work they do. I’m so humbled by it. I want to help…
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First off, you’re not alone. Congrats on being a parent who is frustrated with their child of any age. Frustration is a normal feeling that goes hand in glove with joyful exuberance. The one can’t exist without the other. I’ve written about discipline lots before: Taming Your Tantruming Toddler, Helping Emotional Little Boy, Why Fear & Force Don’t Work, Bad Habits, Big Boy Battles: Loving Discipline, and more under the “parenting” tab. We are frustrated when things aren’t going as well as when we are joyfully exuberant about how wonderful our kid is. The baby is so cute. THE BABY IS CRYING NONSTOP. It all switches so quickly. First time parents are dismayed and rather shocked at how much time it takes to figure out how to really truly meet your baby’s needs. How to answer his or her cries for help, a diaper, a deep burp, a hunger, a rough adjustment to life outside the womb. I was. I had no clue about why my baby was crying. Sure, I’d read the books. I’d talked to everyone. But my baby. My baby. What were his needs? What were his little desires? What could I do for him that would assuage his inane relentless crying? Now some babies have acid reflux, and some babies are “colicky.” Mine had/was neither. He just wanted to be held almost all the time, upright, and he seemed to always hide his burps. And he seemed to know when I sat down. It was a hard learning…
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Three. Oh it’s a magic number. Yes it is! Vests & purse above compliments of Joules. Sneak peek from my post for Monday (yes, Nell did a photoshoot in her backyard and showered.) We are three strong now and boy sometimes the days are long loooooong long. You know what I mean. I cannot complain {just did} but wow. The 12 hours my husband is gone can really stack up. I’m very glad he has a job and one he loves. All the same, my job kills me somedays. I love it too. But death. Chocolate. Whining. Crying. {me & them}. You know. But I digress. The day! The day! How we get through it! Grace just did a great post on a day in her life. I was inspired. You won’t be by mine. My girlfriend Kate is doing a great series interviewing moms with children aged 7 & under & over. That magic age when they’re more involved and helpful. Check it. And my dear friend Cynthia reminds me these are the three toughest ages to have, with the oldest only just 4 this summer. I sure hope so. Carry on. 6:30am. AA kisses me goodbye as I roll over to nurse the le bebe and I bleary eyed whisper DON’T FORGET YOUR LUNCH OR YOUR GLASSES before nursing said bebe back to sleep. 6:59am. SuperBoy bounds into our room shouting triumphantly It’s 7 O’CLOCK! I convince him to play with his baseball cards while I “care for…
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No, I’ve not yet started bilocating though I wish I could. Every time I go to nurse the le bebe down for his nap, the big kids are supposed to play nicely in their rooms, with each other, or by themselves, just not screaming. You guessed it. They scream. She screams, and he cries. It’s really quite a chorus. BabyLoves wakes up, and we’re back to square 2. So because my brain is stretched so far in three crazy directions, I can only direct you to two others places to find me on the internet today: Blessed Is She: really great new daily devotional site that I’m a contributor to. I wrote on success today based on the readings of the day from Mass. It’s a struggle for me to feel successful about my day–unless you count no one going to the ER and most people eating and napping. I crave affirmation! I want to feel a big pat on the back that’s not my kid swinging his wooden bat at me! But those feelings aren’t really the point, are they? Excerpt from the original {because I’m fancy}. We have the opportunity to seek God, truth, beauty, goodness as our final destination. Not that we shouldn’t enjoy success, but it’s a means to an end, not the end itself. Jesus is calling us for something beyond what we are comfortable with. Jesus asks us to leave our habits, our ways we know, and reach for something that is beyond the…
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And . . . news! Apartment Therapy featured our playroom!!!! Which led me to ponder as of late, will I ever have a really clean house? The answer? No. I won’t. Because that would mean my children weren’t here. At all. That’s not (ironically) because they’re all that dirty. That’s also not because they create that much of a mess. It’s because my time spent with them means I’m not cleaning our big big old house. When they’re sleeping (all three at once? pppshaaaa yah right), okay, when the bigs are sleeping and the baby just woke up, I might clean the kitchen, or prep for dinner, or design a new blanket for my etsy shop, or do laundry. But dust? Vacuum? Catch up on all my sewing projects? Probably not. When Design Mom featured our home, I dusted around the frame of the lens of my camera. And with Apartment Therapy, I may have run a vacuum before these pics were snapped. But the day-to-day? It’s a little dirty and filled with cobwebs. But the kids still romp around, oblivious to the dust. They still play chess. They still run up the front stairs shouting “last one’s a rotten egg” before nap time. They still love me, despite my poor housekeeping abilities. I don’t want to look back at this time and think wow my house was so clean. I want to look back and think wow my time was so full. Whether it’s spent volunteering in our local awesome birth& parenting world as an associate…
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